The Long-Run Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps on Place-Based Measures of Economic Opportunity and Socioeconomic Success

Daniel Aaronson, Jacob Faber (), Daniel Hartley, Bhashkar Mazumder and Patrick Sharkey ()
Additional contact information
Jacob Faber: https://wagner.nyu.edu/community/faculty/jacob-william-faber
Patrick Sharkey: https://sociology.princeton.edu/people/patrick-sharkey

No WP-2020-33, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps on census tract-level measures of socioeconomic status and economic opportunity from the Opportunity Atlas (Chetty et al. 2018). We use two identification strategies to identify the long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first compares cross-boundary differences along actual HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach uses a statistical model to identify boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC. We find that the maps had large and statistically significant causal effects on a wide variety of outcomes measured at the census tract level for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Keywords: Redlining; access to credit; segregation; HOLC; economic opportunity; intergenerational mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H81 O18 R21 R23 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2020-12-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: The long-run effects of the 1930s HOLC “redlining” maps on place-based measures of economic opportunity and socioeconomic success (2021)
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DOI: 10.21033/wp-2020-33

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